Dr. Olusolape Ilusanya

This dataset is on Nigerians perception on the effectiveness of different face masks to protect them against COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases caused by viruses. An online survey was conducted with the use of a questionnaire shared via social media using a Snowball sampling technique. This was done from July 18th – July 26th, 2020, during the lockdown period. The questionnaire consisted of 31 items. The first 6 items on the questionnaire addressed the willingness of the respondents to participate in the survey and the demographic details of the participants while the remaining 24 items were grouped to focus on five objectives which are: i. To evaluate the awareness of COVID-19 pandemic. ii. To know Nigerians perception on the effectiveness of different face masks to protect against COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases, iii. To investigate the use of facemasks by Nigerians during the COVID-19 pandemic iv. To know perceived health effect of face masks by Nigerians v. To evaluate the level of knowledge of methods of disposal of used face masks by face masks users The effect of demographic characteristics of respondents on the data of the aforementioned variables were also evaluated. A total of 438 responses were received and the data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Data show the demographic information of the respondents including the age group, gender, educational status, professional affiliation and current location in the country (Table 1). Data indicated an awareness of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in the world (100%) and in Nigeria (94.8%) (Figure 1). The use of facemask is believed to protect against COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases caused by viruses (77.9%). Surgical facemask is perceived to be most effective in protection against COVID-19 (45.9%). However, fabric face masks are the most commonly used face masks (63.0%) and choice of face mask use is influenced more by ease of use (36.3%) and cost (26.3%). Majority of the respondents have used face masks (99.8%) during the pandemic in Nigeria. Furthermore, 84.2 % use facemask whenever they are in public places (Table 3). A higher percentage of the respondents are not comfortable with the use of facemasks (67.4%) however do not perceive face masks use as harmful to their health (50.5%) (Table 4). Moreover, findings of this study shows that 61.0% of the respondents who use fabric face mask wash immediately after usage, 21.7% wash after several usages while 6% rarely wash the facemask after usage. A higher percentage of the respondent (69.4%) have good knowledge of facemask disposal, 18.7% do not have good knowledge while 11.9% are not sure of proper waste disposal methods of used face masks (Table 5). Effect of demographic characteristics of the respondents on the data obtained from the five variables was analysed with ANOVA using statistical package for social sciences –IBM SPSS v 25 and presented in Table 6